Thursday, August 27, 2015

Staunton, August 27 – The Kremlin’s
insistence that it has the right to take pieces of Ukraine because “Ukraine has
no territorial integrity because it is not a real state” is the fifth myth of “Krymnashism,”
one that has deep roots but that is even more absurd than the others, according
to Moscow historian Arkady Popov.

Everyone should have seen this myth
coming, Popov says, because as early as 2008, Putin told US President George W.
bush that “Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? Part of its territory
is Eastern Europe and part, and a quite significant part, was given to it by
us.”That view was then repeated by
Russian politicians and diplomats to others.

In 2014, Putin expanded on the
notion that Russia had given territory to Ukraine by saying that the Bolsheviks
had given Ukraine “significant territories of the historic south of Russia” and
that in 1954, Khrushchev had given Ukraine Crimea. Moreover, Moscow had cut off
territory from Poland and Hungary and given it to Ukraine as well.

It is “unfortunate,” the Moscow
historian continues, that the Kremlin leader didn’t talk about Kaliningrad or
Vyborg or Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk or Tuva or even Karelia. Had he, he might have been
forced to conclude that according to his own arguments, the Russian Federation
is “not a state” either.

Popov points out that “it is
impossible to find any principled differences in the means of forming the
present-day Russian Federation and present-day Ukraine: Both countries were
created by means of the sovereignization of union republics, the RSFSR and the
UkSSR which after the 1917 revolution were formed from the remnants of the
Russian empire.”

The current Kremlin leader condemns
the early Bolsheviks for including “significant territories” of Russia inside
Ukraine, saying they didn’t take into account “the national composition of the residents.”But he doesn’t speak about the fact that the
Bolsheviks “included in the RSFSR enormous territories of the North Caucasus
and Turkestan which were predominantly non-Russian and had declared their
independence.”

“Later in 1924 and 1936, the
Turkestan territories were separated from the USSR, but that didn’t happen with
the North Caucasian ones,” Popov observe s. As for Tuva, which was absorbed in
1944, ethnic Russians there at that time formed only 15 percent of the
population. Now, that figure is 16 percent. Similar observations could be made
about Vyborg and Koenigsberg.

“It would be interesting to find out
from Putin whether the Russian Federation is thus a real state or an artificial
one,” Popov adds.

By the way, he points out, “many
Krymnashists would willingly agree with the idea that it is ‘artificial’!” That
is because for them “’the natural borders’” of Russia are not those of the
Russian Federation but those of their beloved “’Russian world.’”But of course, they are only prepared to talk
about expansion and not contraction as say in the North Caucasus.

Until the middle of the last
century, the historian says, “states were created and expanded mainly by conquest,
that is, even very ‘artificially.’ Among those were the Russian Empire, the
Soviet Union, a significant portion of its foreignborders the Russian Federation inherited and
partially Ukraine as well.”

“But in Krymnash thought, there is
the response that Ukraine unlike Russia did not form and expand ‘on its own’
but was created and expanded by ‘outside hands,’ that is, the Bolsheviks and
then Stalin.” That is Putin’s view, but he has to distort history in order to
make his words plausible even to his supporters.

Despite what the Kremlin leader
says, Kharkiv was never part of Novorossiya, “the toponym Novorossiisk derived
from the toponym Novorossiya and not the reverse, and “no one transferred to
Ukraine from Russia the lands of Novorossiya.”That is clear is one examines both the tsarist and first Soviet censuses
and the history of the early years of the Soviet state.

Popov devotes most of his 5500-word
article to doing just that, and he shows that the lands Putin views as “Russian”
were overwhelmingly Ukrainian in population both in 1897 and in 1926 when the
borders were drawn. That changed only after the Holodomor and Stalin’s ethnic
engineering in the 1930s and 1940s.

Near the end of his article, Popov
says that he must return to “the starting point of our myth: ‘what does ‘the artificiality’
of the Ukrainian state mean?” Is it about frequent changes of its borders? But
then that has been true of most European states. Is it about ethnic variety?
That too is the case with most. In both cases, Russia has more of this than
does Ukraine.

“Undoubtedly,” Popov writes, “there are
problems in Ukraine regarding the formation of a pan-civic identity to the
extent that this is linked with assessments of the past of the country and its
desired future, but they depend on the political views of Ukrainian citizens,”
who vary as do the citizens of every country.

What is striking about Ukraine is
how much unanimity there is and how Russia has helped to promote that, Popov
says. In September 2014, 75 percent of Ukrainians said they had a negative
attitude toward Putin, with only 16 percent feeling positive about him. Eleven
months earlier, those figures were very different: 47 percent had a positive
view of the Kremlin leader.

Moreover, in December 1991, on the
eve of Beloveshchaya Pushcha, Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly for the
independence of “an indivisible and inviolable Ukraine,” and “the residents of
the so-called “Novorossiya’ were no exception to this pattern.” Today, except
where Moscow has created “a separatist enclave,” the same is true.

“Not in a single one of the regions
of Putin’s ‘Novorossiya’ has there been a mass desire of ethnic Russians to
reject their Ukrainian civic identity, although there were and are attempts to
destabilize the situation with the aid of terrorist acts organized as a rule
from abroad,” the Russian historian says.

As a result, this “Krymnash” myth
based on ignorance and bombast collapses on examination. Ukraine is not an
artificial state or at least it is no more artificial than the state whose
leaders are calling it that.